The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy - Hardcover

An Amazon Best Book of July 2018: Flint, Michigan, has become a byword for municipal failure. When the government switched the city's water source, residents started to complain that the water tasted strange and they were growing ill. After repeated strong statements from the city and state claiming the water was just fine, interspersed with perplexing boil-water alerts, residents finally took large-scale water testing into their own hands, and a local hospital analyzed its patient data to prove that residents were suffering levels of lead poisoning at an unheard-of scale. Detroit journalist Anna Clark deftly sets the stage for Flint's man-made disaster: the big drop in population that affected the pipe infrastructure, Flint's financial emergencies, and the long history of sidelining poor and African-American residents in Flint. As Flint's water failures cascade and the population continues to sicken, Clark provides even-keeled reporting of the crisis even as the outrages pile up despite Michigan's attempts to bury them. Those who also read A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr will wonder how we got to this point with bad water yet again...and why, this time, it’s the government who is harming its citizens. The Poisoned City will open readers' eyes to both the scary truth that most of our cities rely on equally weak water infrastructure and how a city's residents can force others to listen. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review

Anna Clark is a journalist living in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in ELLE Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other publications. Anna edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book, and she had been a writer-in-residence in Detroit public schools as part of the InsideOut Literary Arts program. She has also been a Fulbright fellow in Nairobi, Kenya, and a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. Her books include The Poisoned City and Michigan Literary Luminaries.